I noticed this interesting article on Science News about how sighted children of blind mothers don’t need any extra help to develop their communication skills. If anything, children of sighted mothers could use a little extra help. But what really interested me about this article is that it examined the interactions of children with their mothers, not with their fathers or any other primary caregivers. Human studies are always tricky–it’s hard to get large enough sample sizes to get a sense of the variation unrelated to the question of interest, so it makes sense to eliminate any unrelated factors. For this area of research, that might mean examining how children interact with their mothers first (if mothers most commonly serve as the primary caregiver), and then branching out to look at a broader range of interactions.

The same is true in neuroscience: My uncle–who was left-handed–worked for a long time in a neuroscience lab, and he told me that lefties are typically excluded from imaging studies because their brains work differently, which would introduce a whole new dimension of complexity to what is already a complicated question. But that means that when people use neuroimaging scans to learn how the brain works, they can often only tell you how a right-handed person’s brain works. As a lefty, I can’t help but feel that scans of other left-handed folk would be a fascinating addition to any neuroscience study. In any case I think the factors we choose to eliminate as unrelated to the question of interest say a lot about us and our collective blind spots.

When racing dogs retire, they often don’t have any place to go. This has been a problem as more greyhound racing tracks shut down as tastes change too. My neighbors adopted one such ex-racing dog.  They had a large outdoor fenced in yard, and when released into that yard she moved with amazing speed. Always in a circle, and always as fast as she could. She wore her own smooth racing track along the outer edge where grass could not grow back fast enough to keep up with the regular pounding it took from her paws.

I thought it was an interesting that there was a similar process for how neural connections are strengthened in the brain. Repeatedly revisiting the same ideas causes your brain to forge its own kind of self-made race track. Like the greyhound – the more your brain races through the same thought pattern, the more entrenched the connections between the thoughts become by making stronger neural connections in the brain. (This seems to be especially true for obsessive compulsive behaviors and even rehashing the past repeatedly as for post-traumatic stress disorder). But, rather than adding worrying to your list of worries (no ones needs a meta-worry) this Time magazine article suggests we can use this neuroplasticity to our advantage by retraining our brain. Changing thought patterns can change the brain itself. There is some evidence that regular meditation has measureable positive effects on the mind, including stronger gamma waves, which can help with problem solving. (Some members of the group regularly do yoga – is this the secret of their brilliance?)

Anyhow, maybe the trick to getting out of a negative thought holding pattern is to make like an ex-racing greyhound and just forge a new track.

For the first time in my life, I’m living in a country where I don’t speak the language. Or as it may be, languages, as the local language here is Catalan, which is an entirely different language. As a Dutch person, we are taught from an early age to speak English, German and French. I was even taught Greek and Latin, yet, Spanish wasn’t part of the curriculum. It took me by surprise how disabled I felt, and still feel, not being able to communicate. Language is such an important tool in our daily lives, not only for life mattering instances (like the time when Kasper had an illness and I was trying to communicate unsuccessfully with his teacher about his needs and medications), but also for social matters, like making contact with the other moms at the school or asking my baker which bread tastes the closest to our beloved Dutch bread. This is why I am so jealous of Lara who picked up Catalan in a matter of weeks. However, I started wondering: stick me in a nursery class for 9 hours a day, wouldn’t I be just as advanced as Lara? Where is the science that backs up this wide-spread cultural belief that children acquire a new language faster than adults?

Turns out, this evidence is lacking. The observation is certainly that children pick up a language at a much faster pace than adults, but both are generally in extremely different environments, making this an unfair comparison. Also, there are plenty of examples of adults who picked up a new language in a very rapid manner using an intense language learning course (take for instance our soon-to-be Dutch queen, originally from Argentina, who was nearly fluent in Dutch in a matter of months). What is needed is a controlled experiment, yet, on my quick scan of the literature, only one experiment of the sort is reported and dates back from 1925. And here they actually found adults to learn faster than children do. As far as my quick search allows, there is no scientific report that demonstrates that children do indeed learn a language faster than adults do. They do learn a language differently: using mimicry, children generally obtain more accent-free language. Additionally, children have a lower sense of self-conscious and a natural enthusiasm to learn new tasks, which obviously helps in language acquisition. Yet, adults can take advantage of their much larger native-language vocabulary than children. Moreover, adults can make conscious and deliberate use of grammatical generalizations whereas young children are stuck with a less efficient approach of hearing correct phrases over and over again and being corrected.

This quick research into language learning science provided me with two interesting conclusions. 1) My $500 Rosetta Stone course, based on language immersion without native language instruction (as this is the way children learn) is based on shite, and 2) I have no more excuses. The speed at which I acquire these languages can not be blamed on the speed of my grey matter making the necessary new connections, but rather on the amount of hours I invest in surrounding myself with the new language. This second conclusion is a critical one, but that is a whole new blog topic…

It was the birthday of the late and much missed Douglas Adams last month and I noted that google marked it with one of their doodles.

À propos of nothing else in particular, aside from Andrew saying, “you owe me a blog”, I thought an aside from Adams would make good filler. Just in case some haven’t heard of Douglas Adams (I can’t quite believe there would be anyone in this category but then I found out recently that one of us hadn’t heard of Tolstoy – almost as bad as an ignorance of narwhals) he famously wrote the five books constituting the Hitchhikers Guide trilogy. Less well known is that he collaborated with the biologist/author/presenter Mark Carwardine on a book called “Last Chance To See” (which just goes to show that humour, space travel and robot sex sells better than conservation). As far as I can recall there is nothing on parasites, virulence evolution or the importance of temperature in this book, but LCTS does have a tenuous link to the group – it contains a whole chapter on Kakapos.

Anyway, the quote (no, not the one about liking the whooshing sound that deadlines make as they go by – though that is good too) comes from an eclectic collection called “The Salmon of Doubt” put together after Adams died.

“My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.



This is not quite true, in fact.

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.”

The observation about sloths is rather endearing. One simply wishes the comment about Branwell were true. He died a consumptive alcoholic apparently.

As spring approaches, we will soon be witness to an elegant example of umwelt. A field of flowers is merely a visual and olfactory experience for most of us, but beyond our level of perception it is an exciting superhighway of signals. Flowers present a multimodal schmorgesborg of sights, textures, and stimuli to attract pollinators.  A recent study by Dominic Clarke and colleagues at the University of Bristol adds another type of signal to the already complex interactions between flower and bug by providing evidence that a trip through the daisies for a bumblebee is literally electrifying.

It turns out that flying insects have a positive electrical potential and that flowers generally have negative electrical potentials. Clarke et al. measured the electrical potential of flower stems during bee visits and found that when bees alight on flowers there is an electrical interaction. Further, when bees were trained using “E-flowers” (artificial flowers that had distinct charges and different nectar rewards) they were able to learn that charged E-flowers had rewards and uncharged did not. This means that they can tell the difference.

Flowers before (left half) and after (right half) being sprayed with electrostatic colored powder that allows us to visualize electrical fields.

The cherry on top of this elegant study was an assay showing that bees can also differentiate between patterns of charge. Through miracles of Macgyvery that that are far beyond my comprehension the authors were able to create E-flowers with homogenous versus bulls-eye distributions of electrical charge. The bumble bees were able to learn to associate rewards with one pattern or the other demonstrating that
they were able to distinguish between E-flowers with similar charges, but differing E-field geometries.

How might this all play out in your backyard?  The authors found that adding differential
charges to artificial colored flowers increased learning efficiency in the bees. These signals are new to us, but clearly not to the bees and are likely used in concert with other flower signals. The real test will be examining the importance of these cues in the field.

I was listening to a Radiolab podcast about guts this weekend, and there was a bit on treating mice with a probiotic supplement. After their treatment, the mice were dropped into water as a stress test, because apparently mice can swim but they don’t like to do it. The probiotic mice had an attenuated stress response compared to untreated control mice, and the probiotic mice continued to swim long after the untreated mice gave up.

This made me wonder whether my own stress levels could be improved by probiotic supplements, which lead to me wondering whether I’d actually want to decrease my stress levels. I’m not a particularly stressed out person (maybe I already have good gut bacteria), and the stress I do experience tends to motivate me to work.

Although it wasn’t the point of the podcast, I liked the probiotic mice because they made me think about how negative feelings (like stress) can be channeled towards keeping you swimming. Which leads me to the rejection trophy.

Arguably my greatest stroke of genius during grad school, the trophy began its life as a women’s softball trophy and it ended up in my possession for reasons completely unrelated to softball. One day, my friend Ben had a (now published) paper rejected. Ben was telling me about the rejection over the shared wall of our cubicles and as I was listening to him, I was looking at the trophy. I took a Post-It, wrote “Rejection trophy: Ben” on it, stuck it on the base of the trophy, and a lab tradition was born.

As you can see, the Post-It chain has since been extended as we’ve crossed out names and passed it along to the most recently rejected lab member (Photo credit: Ben Parker).

Last week, Ben was telling me about how he just had a paper rejected in less than 12 hours – a new record. On the bright side, he has the trophy back and we all love getting the trophy. With his permission, I’ve reproduced his acceptance speech below because it really drives home how you can use negative emotions as a source of motivation. You may want to have a tissue ready, just in case.

“We’re always proud to get the trophy. Not because we’re unhappy or we like rejection, but because the rejection trophy represents the spark of achievement in each of us. If we never got rejected, it would mean that we’re not trying hard enough, that we’re not shooting high enough. The trophy reflects our efforts to push the envelope, and if we shoot for the moon and miss, we land among the stars. I’d like to thank the academy editorial board.”

NB: Ben would like to make it absolutely clear that he was being tongue-in-cheek and does not actually say things like “if we shoot for the moon and miss, we land among the stars.”

If you attended my lab meeting a few weeks ago, you will remember that I tried to physically interpret a three-dimensional graph using some yoga-esque poses. I’m still having trouble figuring out the best way to visually represent that interaction, as well as what it truly means. Along with my public speaking and presentation skills, visual representation of data is one of the skills that I feel I need to practice in terms of presenting my work to my colleagues and the public.

Could you successfully represent six different variables in a two-dimensional graph with two colors? May I draw your attention to the best graph in human history:

This graphic represents the invasion (and subsequent retreat and defeat) of Russia by Napoleon’s army in 1812. I could go on and on about typhus, nasty wounds, and the age-old advice of never waging war against Russians on their home turf, but I just want you to focus on how incredibly clean and understandable this graphic is (see the legend). Six separate variables are represented; the line width represents the size of the army (on original drawing, 1mm=10k men), the line positioning shows latitude and longitude of troops’ positioning, and their direction corresponds with direction of invasion and retreat, in addition to temperature and date.

My goal with this blog was merely to gush about this map/graphic and how brilliant I think it is. One of my odd hobbies aside from eating cake and watching horror movies is looking at maps that show data and how those data are distributed, so perhaps I can learn something from it, and strive to incorporate more elegance into the 20 pages of SPSS graphs I hand to Matt when I want to debrief him on my latest experiment.

Also, as an aside, despite the clarity of this graphic, it was clearly ignored by the Germans from 1942-1943 at Stalingrad.

Recently, Courtney blogged about decision making, mentioning the (in)famous “coin-flip method” of decision making.  For anyone unfamiliar with the method, the basic idea is that if you are faced with a decision and you are ambivalent, all you need to do to make your decision is flip a coin.  While the coin is spinning in the air, you will undoubtedly start rooting for one outcome over the other, making that decision the correct one.

I’ve used this method in the past; I don’t anymore.  There isn’t a story, it’s just that I thought about it and decided that it was a bad decision making tool.  My reasoning is that the method is based on the faulty premise that the correct answer is already known.  But answers often aren’t known in advance.  If they were, we wouldn’t need to do experiments to learn about nature; we would start experiments and halfway through learn that we knew the truth all along.  Alternatively, we could finish our experiments but instead of properly analyzing the data, we would go with our gut interpretation of them.  Making tough decisions, answering questions, these are necessarily slow processes.  Forcing a decision in the time it takes to flip a coin seems foolish.  A decision would be made, but it might not be the best one given the available information.

That said, Courtney, I know that you’ll do great at a research-based institution, but I didn’t flip a coin to figure it out.

I agree with Monica that scientists should consider a broad audience when they explain their work, but I would argue that anthropomorphized language and dry, precise language are equally incomprehensible to someone lacking an introduction to evolution by natural selection. The notion that selection is short-sighted, that survival of the fittest can lead a population into extinction is not an easy one, and it deserves more explanation than can be given in any particular example, no matter how cunningly written.

Two ectothermic species?

But I’ll go further to argue that cold language can also serve to distance us from the object of our study, and that carries its own risks.  It can be misleading to ascribe human motives to birds, but dry langauge could also let us overlook instances when humans act a lot like birds (mafia behavior, anyone?). Organisms have to resolve the same basic problems and the solutions aren’t always as different as their divergent appearance would lead us to believe. For example, we might be tempted to think that ectotherms–organisms that have to rely on behavior to maintain their internal temperature–are very different from endotherms like ourselves that can keep a consistent body temperature. I’ve been told that I’m a poor specimen of an endotherm, but I definitely think better at warmer temperatures than are found in most offices and labs.  Katey has informed me that I’m not alone in this, that in fact S. Young (1988) suggests that people can solve logic puzzles faster if they are just a little bit warmer. Perhaps by not distancing ourselves from the organisms we study, we can understand our own biology a little bit better. In any case, next time someone asks me how I could become a better scientist, I might reply that heat lamps would be a good start.

Image from PNAS Vignolini et al 2012

The photo above depicts the fruit of Pollia condensata, a plant native to Mozambique, Tanzania and Ethiopia. What you might find surprising is that the fruit pictured is actually a recent image taken from a specimen collected in 1974. What allows for the fruit to retain its brilliant color? While a great deal of organisms derive their color from pigments, structural pigmentation is another form by which color can be produced. Instead of the absorption and reflection of specific wavelengths of light by pigments, fruit of Pollia condensata appears blue to us due to the layered helicoidal arrangement of thin fibers within the outer skin of the fruit. The positioning and distance between the fibers as well as regional variation in the number of layers, produces what the authors call a pointillist-like resemblance.

A small blurb came out in Science’s “News of the Week” describing the finding published in a PNAS article. An author of the paper was quoted as saying “The fruit’s dazzling display may have evolved to capitalize on birds’ attraction to sparkly objects…or to trick them into eating something that looks like a blueberry without going to the trouble of making juicy flesh”. A separate short commentary was published in Science shortly after titled “Evolution’s Misleading Language” which, in effect, issued a reprimand for scientists and their tendency to humanize evolutionary mechanisms and for the use of language that implies intentional functional acquisitions during evolutionary processes. Burdett argues that instead of saying “going to the trouble of”, it would have been more appropriate to say that allocation of energy into structural pigmentation would have been less energetically costly than producing nutrient-rich fruit.

We often speak “evolution’s misleading language” in our lab meetings, informal conversations etc, but with the realization that the actual processes that are occurring are not guided by any sort of premeditated function. What Burdett argues is that using such language is actually a disservice to the public who are not trained in evolutionary biology. Anthropomorphizing phenomena often seems like a simple form of explanation, and is often effective in creating a “sexier” story, but maybe if we want people to think more evolutionarily (which we do and could offer many important benefits and solutions to current global issues), we should be careful about using phrases like “the parasite might like the host to do this” outside of our small lab groups. There’s probably a trade-off (haha) hidden in there somewhere.

We travel a lot for work. Some of us complain a lot about that travel. We’ve had our flights cancelled, delayed, or rerouted because of hurricanes, snowstorms, strikes, and volcanoes.

Last week, like so many others, the weather gods sent a snow storm on the day I was heading out to Florida to spend some time with my parents. I had a long day of travel ahead of me, flying to Fort Myers, via Philly, then Charlotte. Naturally, my first flight was delayed, so my connections were hopeless. In the end, I got on a direct Philly to Fort Myers flight, and — despite a 3 hour delay in State College — I got to Florida 15 minutes earlier than originally scheduled.

I thought I ought to reflect on my good fortune and keep a record of a time when air travel worked out better than planned. It seems to happen so rarely.

Also, I got to see a pretty cool sunset from 15000′ (to which this picture does NOT do justice.)

“Now your life as a scientist is ruined”, those were the words Andrew told me when the first paper I ever submitted went through the review process fairly easily and at its first attempt. Perhaps he was right. At least it didn’t prepare me for the chain of scientific disappointments I faced in the past couple of months.

From the start of my PhD, now already 6.5 years ago, Andrew and I have been working on our aggressive treatment hypothesis: Is aggressive treatment really the best way to manage resistance? This finally resulted in the synthesis of a very nice (if I may say so myself) manuscript that I feel very proud of, kind of like my science baby, with an incubation period of six years. So, August 2012, I nervously pressed the ‘submit’ button on the Science website. That same week, I would also submit a fellowship proposal to the Marie Curie and one to the EMBO. I was on a science high! What a productive week it had been, and based on my previous experience, I would leave the Read group proudly with a Science paper in the pocket and venture onward to exciting new projects with my awarded fellowships.

It is now half a year, five journal rejections and both fellowship rejections later. How does one deal with these disappointments? I don’t know. I am generally a very optimistic person, but even I started thinking doom and gloom. But the good thing about being a scientist is that deep inside of us, we are all snobs. We all think our science and our papers are the best, so if we get rejected, it is because the reviewers didn’t understand or appreciate the importance of our work. At least this way it hurts a little less.

Our manuscript is now at its 30^th version and 6^th submission. Another fellowship is currently under review and new ideas are under development. One day both missions will succeed. The best mantra that helped me to deal with these disappointments came from our very own Nicole Mideo with her comment to one of the blogs here: ‘To improve your success rate, you just need to double your failure rate’. And I am working very hard at the latter.

Back to whether my life was ruined with my initial success. I don’t think it was. Quite the opposite, it got me excited about being a scientist. I sniffed success and it feels great. If my PhD would have started with a long chain of rejections, I’m not sure whether I would have found the motivation to finish my PhD and most importantly see the joy that doing science really is.

Only a small proportion of PhDs in science end up working in science. This is at least in part due to the Ph.D Job Crisis. When University of California system postdocs were asked if they wanted a academic research position at the beginning and the end of their postdoctoral training. Positive responses in men fell from 59% to 45%, in women this response fell from 46% to a terrible 11% (Goulden et al 2011). As a female post-doc (and wife of a post-doc) I’m flooded with messages about how ridiculously competitive my life is going to be, how I’m extra challenged as a woman, and desperately little information about how to come out on top.

People have been circling dangerously close to my blog-post topic for weeks now. Lillian posted on artistic expression artistic expression and the mark was narrowly missed by Adam Frank of NPR. Eleanore had mentioned a similar topic, but to my delight wrote about bilingual birds (my delight was due to the topic…not that it was not my topic). Not only is practicing science remarkably similar to practicing art, pursuing a career in science is remarkably similar to pursuing a career in the arts. In order to continue in academia and not become a complete emotional and mental wreck, I’m going to need to become a little more of a rock star.

So is it arena rock you are after or a gig a steady paying gig at the local coffee house?

There are several attributes I would consider key for rock star success. Obviously, there is talent. Either you got it or you don’t. However, many extremely talented rock musicians (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobaine, Bradley Nowell, the sad list could go on forever) were unable to cope with life in rock. There is probably another sad list somewhere else of brilliant scientist who left science because it was too much or stayed in and cracked up. Successful longevity is clearly only partially based on raw talent.

While I’m on emotional fitness, confidence is clearly key. I think there is a thin line between confidence and arrogance. Confidence includes fighting for your point when you are correct and owning the stage when you are on, but also realizing that it is ok to be wrong and respecting your audience.

In both careers there must be a certain amount of luck. In addition to the occasional rumored deal with the devil to achieve stardom, a lot of rock musicians are simply at the right place at the right time. I have heard similar things said of jobs, grants, and collaborations. However, one of my favorite quotes comes from the rapper Ice-T, “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation”. Unlike god-given talent you are in control of skills. I can work hard and push myself to read, to write, and to think. Just like a professional musician, no one can tell me how much I need to practice to achieve my own definition of excellence.

I think that personally defining excellence is the most important thing you can do. What precisely do you value? What would make you feel like a science rock super star? Is it is the craft? The songmanship? The fans? Do you care if anyone notices your work or are you happy to make music or science for the pure gratification of the act? Will you measure your worth in questions answered, students trained, lives saved, or grant monies awarded? There is not correct answer to these questions. Both Carly Rae Jepsen and Eva Cassidy could be described as successful.

These sorts of decisions come to the heart of the matter. Your goals will dictate the skills you must practice and the confidence you must build. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently and when I think of the musicians and scientists I respect most they have remained true to themselves and by doing so have become successful. By my count that is 3.5 out of 5 things that I can control. It is time to focus on those and tell everyone and everything else, “Sorry you aren’t on the backstage list. VIP passes are by artist’s invitation only.”